Pennylane Accountant in Paris

Which chartered accountant works on Pennylane? Hayot Expertise, a French chartered accountancy firm based at 58 rue de Monceau in Paris 8, produces its clients' bookkeeping directly inside Pennylane. In practice: we capture your documents and bank flows in the platform, we reconcile, we prepare and file your VAT returns, we review the accounts, we produce the annual accounts and tax filings, and we hand you readable interim accounts every month. If you are already on Pennylane with another firm, we take the file over without you having to re-import anything. If you are not there yet, we organise the switch. The core engagement starts at €258 excl. VAT per month, fixed quote within 24 hours.

Many firms now say they "accept" Pennylane. That is not the useful question. The useful question is who produces inside the platform: a firm that genuinely keeps the books there knows the settings that save time, the setup traps that surface at year end, and the connectors that actually last. A firm that merely logs in to pull an export redoes the work in its own software, and you get your accounts a quarter late.

This is full bookkeeping, not software assistance. It includes:

• Monthly bookkeeping: document capture and matching, account allocation, bank reconciliation across all your accounts, including neobanks and online payment providers.
• VAT: checking the bases, preparing and filing the return, tracking VAT credits or liabilities, handling special regimes (reverse charge, intra-EU, one-stop shop for distance selling).
• Account review: justifying balances line by line, clearing suspense accounts, cut-off on expenses and income, provisions and depreciation.
• Annual accounts and tax filings: statutory accounts, corporate tax return, filing with the commercial court registry, shareholder minutes and profit allocation.
• The monthly review: readable interim accounts, profit to date, forecast cash position, and variances against the previous month.

What you see on your side, inside Pennylane: your sales and purchase invoices, reconciled bank flows, your profit during the year and your cash position, up to date, without having to ask.

The core bookkeeping engagement starts at €258 excl. VAT per month, adjusted case by case to your actual volumes. There is no fixed package: the amount depends on the number of documents, the VAT regime, the number of bank accounts and any add-on work such as payroll or annual corporate secretarial. You receive a fixed quote within 24 hours of a first call, and the amount quoted is the amount invoiced.

Two points of transparency. The Pennylane platform subscription is billed separately by the vendor: it does not pass through the firm, and the firm takes no commission on it. And taking over a file already open on Pennylane is not charged on top of the monthly fee: that is precisely the point of staying on the platform. Full details of our packages are published on our pricing page.

This is the simplest case, and yet the one that worries people most. Your Pennylane file belongs to you: changing firms means no export, no re-import and no reconfiguration.

The process runs in four steps. We sign the engagement letter and collect the identification documents required by anti-money-laundering rules. We then write to your previous firm the handover letter provided for by Article 163 of the French decree of 30 March 2012, which governs transfers between firms. We obtain access to your Pennylane workspace. Finally, we review the existing setup before taking over.

That last step is the one most often skipped, and the one that costs the most. We systematically check the chart of accounts and how well it fits your actual business, VAT rates and regime, the recovery of opening balances, analytical axes where they exist, the state of bank reconciliation over the last twelve months, and suspense accounts. A file taken over without that review produces a painful first close, and sometimes a VAT return to correct.

If you are not on Pennylane yet, the switch is a short but real project. We recover the accounting entries file required by Article L. 47 A of the French tax procedure code where it exists, and rebuild opening balances where it is missing, which is common with a spreadsheet or older software.

The switch happens on a chosen date, usually the start of a month or quarter. It interrupts neither the VAT return nor the close in progress. Allow one to four weeks depending on volume: a small business moving from a spreadsheet switches within days, while an SME recovering several years from Sage or Cegid, with payroll and e-commerce flows, takes three to four weeks. For the detailed operational method, see our article on switching to Pennylane.

One remark that sometimes irritates: waiting for 1 January brings no technical advantage. It is a stubborn belief, and it costs you several months of visibility on your figures.

For a newly incorporated company, or a business that has never had proper accounting tooling, the work is different: there is nothing to recover, everything has to be defined. The initial setup determines what you will be able to read for the next five years.

We configure the chart of accounts around your business model rather than a generic template, the VAT regime and rates, the analytical axes that match your real margin lines (by product, channel, site or job), the automation rules worth having, and the approval flows. We then connect banks and neobanks (Qonto, Shine, Revolut, traditional accounts), payroll, document capture through Dext, and where relevant payment and e-commerce platforms (Stripe, GoCardless, Shopify, PrestaShop, marketplaces), with testing to confirm the flows genuinely come through.

What we configure and monitor area by area inside the platform is described on our Pennylane page.

Pennylane has been registered as an approved platform by the French tax administration on a definitive basis since 11 December 2025, having passed the interoperability tests. It natively handles issuing and receiving in Factur-X format. That is an objective argument in choosing the tool, not merely a commercial one.

The official timetable is as follows:

• 1 September 2026: every VAT-registered business must be able to receive electronic invoices. Large companies and mid-sized businesses must also issue them.
• 1 September 2027: issuing obligation extends to SMEs, small businesses and micro-businesses.

Accounting already kept inside an approved platform reaches this deadline without an extra project: third-party master data is current, approval flows exist, the data is clean. For the engagement dedicated to the reform, see our French e-invoicing 2026 service.

Three concrete differences you can check before signing with any firm.

How fast you get information. A firm producing inside the platform gives you monthly interim accounts. A firm re-keying into its own software gives you annual accounts three to four months after the close. The difference is not comfort, it is decision-making: you do not arbitrate pay, an investment or a hire on figures that are a quarter old.

A setup designed for the close. A configuration can look elegant on screen and still produce a wrong VAT return or a non-compliant entries file. The firm that will have to justify the balances at review configures things differently from the one that will merely install them.

Professional liability. Samuel Hayot is a chartered accountant registered with the Ordre des experts-comptables de Paris Île-de-France and a statutory auditor. The accounts produced engage the firm's liability, covered by the profession's mandatory insurance. A technical integrator, however competent, carries no liability for your accounts.

We do not sell full automation, because it does not exist.

Automatic document recognition is good, not perfect: a badly photographed invoice, a supplier changing format, an ambiguous label all call for human judgement. Automation rules reproduce what they were taught: badly set at the outset, they industrialise an error instead of preventing it. Bank connectors drop, disconnect after a password change, or bring through duplicates that have to be spotted.

Above all, no tool makes a management decision. The split between salary and dividends, the choice of a VAT regime, the classification of an expense, the treatment of an equity transaction remain matters of professional judgement. Pennylane is not registered with the Ordre des experts-comptables and certifies no accounts: it is an excellent production tool, it is not a firm.

We will also say it the other way round: if your business runs on fifteen invoices a year, Pennylane is probably oversized, and we will tell you so.

• Structured small and medium businesses that want to read their profit during the year, not discover it at the close.
• Startups and growing companies whose reporting must be presentable to an investor or a bank at any moment.
• E-commerce and multichannel businesses, where reconciling payment providers and handling distance-selling VAT is the real issue.
• Professional practices and consulting firms, for whom invoicing, collections and cash tracking matter as much as bookkeeping.
• Holding and asset-holding companies, where analytics and consolidated flows justify a single tool.

To go further by sector, see our pages on e-commerce, startups and professional practices.

This is the most frequent situation among the enquiries we receive: the tool is fine, the relationship with the firm is not. Slow responses, late reporting, a contact who changes every six months, no advice beyond production.

In that case nothing you built inside Pennylane is lost. Your history, connectors, invoice templates and automations stay in place. What changes is who produces and who answers. The switch takes a few days once the engagement letter is signed, and requires no administrative steps from you: the incoming firm writes to the outgoing one.

If you are still weighing several firms, our article on how to choose a Pennylane accountant sets out the questions to ask before signing, including those we are not best placed to answer.

Describe your situation in a few lines: business, legal form, VAT regime, approximate document volume, and whether you are already on Pennylane. You receive a written scope and a fixed quote within 24 hours. The first exchange is free and without obligation.

If your accounting is behind before any switch, we handle the bookkeeping catch-up first. For the accounting engagement outside a Pennylane context, see bookkeeping and review, and for financial steering beyond production, digital finance transformation.